Field of the Invention
This specification relates to mobile communication and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for an efficient configuration of a Mobility Management Entity (MME) and a Serving Gateway (S-GW) in a mobile communication system.
Related Art
Generally, a mobile communication system has been developed to provide users with voice services while ensuring mobility of the user. However, the mobile communication system has gradually extended its area of service from voice services to data services, and, presently, the mobile communication system has evolved to a level of being capable of providing high rate (or high speed) data services. However, in the mobile communication system through which the current services are being provided, due to a lack of resources and the users' growing request for faster services, a more evolved mobile communication system is being required.
In order to meet with such requirements, as one of the next generation mobile communication systems, standardization processes for Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are being carried out. The commercial usage of the LTE has been initiated since year 2010, and this corresponds to a communication technology that realizes high-rate packet based communication having a maximum transmission rate of approximately 100 Mbps. And, an LTE-A system, which is an enhanced version of the LTE system, is capable of supporting a maximum transmission rate of several hundreds of Mbps. However, in case the number of user equipments (UEs) being serviced within a single base station increases, since the user equipments are required to share the provided resources, even if the actual system performance can support the transmission of high-rate packets, the UE may actually be provided with a low-rate data service. Therefore, in order to resolve such problems, as a solution for extending the service area or expanding network capacity, the adoption of micro base stations or Pico base stations having a service area that is narrower than the conventional Macro base station in the network or the adoption of a large number of small-sized base stations, such as installing Femto cell base stations, which only establish one service area for one household is being considered.
However, in case the number of small-sized cells, such as Femto cells, is equal to several hundreds of thousands or more, this leads to an increase in the overhead of a core network (CN), which corresponds to an ultra high-speed network that controls all of the small-sized cells and that interconnects diverse sub-networks. Therefore, diverse methods for reducing the overhead are being considered.